So it appears that it's a known bug. Unfortunately in the askubuntu question the answer suggested is to create an upstart script. Ubuntu 15.04 and Debian have now adopted systemd and no longer use upstart.
– Andy FusniakApr 29 '15 at 5:04

3 Answers
3

I've recently encountered this problem on my Ubuntu 15.04 64 bit box. The setupcon command set the fonts to what I had set with dpkg-reconfigure console-setup.

I added setupcon to my rc.local, but that left a gap where the font was still wrong (because rc.local is executed after the console is setup), so that wasn't good enough for me.

So, I decided to go deeper. I edited my /lib/systemd/system/console-setup.service file and appended ExecStart=/bin/setupcon to the end of the file. That will call setupcon when the console is setup, correcting the fonts on boot without a time gap.

This problem seems to be caused by a mismatch in the naming of fonts
that console-setup expects vs what are in /usr/share/consolefonts/, and
thus copied to /etc/console-setup/ when you pick a font to use (using
dpkg-reconfigure console-setup).

If you go to a console and do an strace /lib/udev/console-setup-tty fbcon,
you can see that it is trying to open fonts like this:

/etc/console-setup/Lat15-TerminusBold11x22.psf

But if you look in /etc/console-setup/, there are only a handful of
fonts in there (the ones you picked), and they look more like this:

/etc/console-setup/Lat15-TerminusBold22x11.psf.gz

One has height x width, and the other has width x height.

The problem can be fixed in a few ways.

(1) /lib/udev/console-setup-tty could be fixed - This is the more
permanent, upstream solution.

(2) You could manually change /etc/default/console-setup, reversing the
height and width in FONTSIZE. This will need to be done each time you
change the fonts using dpkg-reconfigure console-setup. But when the
machine reboots, that preference is kept.

(3) You could install the fonts that console-setup-tty expects. This
is what I call the "overkill" option. I did it like this:

In /etc/rc.local:

# install console fonts and then set up console
/etc/console-setup/fonts.sh install
/lib/udev/console-setup-tty fbcon